I am interested in how children learn what words and structures mean, and how this learning process relates to the way languages change over time. My experiments and corpus studies focus on linguistic modality (e.g., must, have to, should, maybe), an area of language that expresses uncertain or non-factual information.

I gave a talk (co-author, Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux): Internal bias feeds incremention: experimental evidence from must in child Toronto English. New Ways of AnalyzingVariation (NWAV) 47. New York University. Oct 18-21. Slides_NWAV_CournanePerezLeroux

Vishal Arvindam & I gave a workshop on Eye tracking for Sociolinguistics at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 47. New York University. Oct 18-21. Slides_NWAV_ArvindamCournane

Dunja Veselinovic & I presented two posters at Crossing the Borders:a conference for developmental work at the intersection of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics at University of Potsdam in Germany, Sept 27-29.

Dunja Veselinovic presented our joint paper “It must be that the structure comes first” at the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA92), on January 4-7, 2018 in Salt Lake City, UT.

This semester I’m teaching First Language Acquisition for undergraduates, and co-teaching the graduate Sociolinguistics Seminar: Language Change with Laurel MacKenzie.

Fall 2017:

Annemarie van Dooren & Anouk Dieuleveut (UMD) presented our joint paper (w/ Valentine Hacquard), “Learning what must and can must and can mean” at the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Dec 20-22.

I gave an invited talk at the Rutgers Workshop on Word Learning and Linguistic Theory on 9/30. The talk is titled “Polysemy against the odds: Learning Modal Words”, and presents joint work with Valentine Hacquard, Annemarie van Dooren, and Anouk Dieuleveut (NSF#BCS-1551628).